GreyWing

I only say this because I was working on a news site for 2 months and had my content writers on it pumping out stories. Got to top of Google and brought in about 100 visitors a day. Left it dormant for a few more months, then took it down.

Relaunched the site which is now geared up for Facebook and social media and after only 3 days and a few stories it has 400 visitors a day from facebook.

I know it relates to exacts as well in google and the type of site you have, but right now I couldn't give a sh!# about Google. I can't believe I am saying that.

Now that is just one of my sites, how long before that is 2,3 and rising etc. Maybe a time for a bit of a rethink on Google being God.

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SecNam

google has its fingers in to many pies. Its only a matter of time when facebook brings its own search engine and when that happens google will struggle (my opinion).

bensd

I think someone said in the 2012 prediction thread that FB would buy bing.com

SecNam

I dont think they need to buy bing, FB has all the member base, business base, technology and budget just to put a search on the facebook.com front page.

MikeJDS

That would be huge!

Social activity on sites is affecting the SERPS more & more everyday.
What with Google+1 etc.
And it makes sense why its a much better way for search engines to measure sites in this way, when you think about it.

Facebook having Bing would push all of this to another level.

I agree with what your saying... Traditional SEO seems to be becoming less & less important.

Mike

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Blossom

Don't know if the Bing thing would work out, they've invested over $1 billion in it and it's really not worth that so they'll lose a lot if they sell.

In terms of Facebook vs Google, Facebook has huge limitations. It depends on so many factors, including who your target audience is and what the site is about. Facebook will become increasingly better for reaching a wider audience, but the noise will increase too.

The quality of the traffic will also vary depending on what type of site you have. You might get 400 people looking at a nice car, but that doesn't mean they'll buy one. It's not a buyer mentality as much as Google.

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MikeJDS

I don't think Facebook ever intends to have a search engine inside Facebook.
That would be a bit useless.

Facebook measures user activity across the web (not just on FB)
Social activity is a great way to measure a sites relevance to users.
Thats what Google+ is all about really. Its not about google having a better social site than Facebook. Its about getting all that data to improve the SERPS.

Bing would be perfect for Facebook, they would use there social data to control the SERPS within Bing.
Facebook has more of this kind of info than google and that would be a big advantage.
Social search rankings is where the battle is.
If Facebook got Bing. "Its game on!"

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bensd

Google obviously see social media as a threat to its business/market share as they have been trying so hard to get into the social arena

edo

I would say the answer to your question is:

Yes for now but increasingly no.

Any competitive terms needs a decent amount of good incoming links (ie SEO) to rank and get traffic. Less competitive terms can get by on fresh content and some social media signals.

As time goes by fresh content and social will become more important and links less so. This will happen over the next few years imo though and not months.

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Blossom

Facebook's main goal is to keep people on Facebook, or get people back on Facebook (other than where it conflicts with monetisation in some instances). This is at odds with website owners who want to direct people to their site from Facebook, not keep people on their Facebook page. If that was ever to work to its full potential, people would have to build everything within Facebook or Facebook apps - which admittedly is happening on a small scale at the moment, but isn't feasible on a large scale until Facebook drastically overhauls the terrible developer tools, capabilities and interface.

I would argue that the information Google currently has is more useful than that which Facebook currently has. Facebook knows a lot of the finer details, but Google knows a lot more of the useful details. And don't forget Google Chrome records a huge amount of information across all sites by the users, whether or not they have Facebook buttons, and is the second most used browser.

Social data is also much more than just Facebook.

There will always be a huge cross-section of sites where social information is irrelevant or not suitable for ranking sites or collecting info from. I'm not saying social isn't important, because it is, but it's also currently way too easy to abuse and not suitable for everything.

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